This invention relates to task management.
Projects and group activities often involve tasks whose sequence must be planned and monitored in light of the resources required and available.
In the construction of concrete buildings, for example, such tasks as concrete work, form work, carpentry, and finish work, must be coordinated, and the available resources, such as working crews and equipment, must be distributed among them systematically. The construction planner, based on experience, must plan the sequence in which the work will be done, and the rate at which resources will be devoted to any task (e.g. how many men to include in the work crew that will pour the concrete foundation).
During construction, the effects on the plan of changed circumstances, such as design alterations, labor strikes, or unforeseen underground obstructions, must be considered by the construction superviser.
One method of construction scheduling is the critical path method, CPM, in which diagrams depict the stages of a project as nodes, and the durations of the tasks required to reach the successive stages as arrows. In a variation of CPM, known as PERT, ranges of task duration may also be shown. Additional information, such as cost or number of workers, may be added in the form of text along the arrows or on the nodes of the diagram.
Another technique, linear scheduling, depicts repetitive tasks by a line plotted on a coordinate system in which the horizontal axis represents time, the vertical axis represents location, and the slope of the line represents the projected production rate for the task.